Wednesday, November 12, 2014

I awake with my
mouth full of coir, or is it the doormat? Again! I spit a chunk into the fine
satin of my palm before I trust myself to breathe without choking. I try to
swing my legs over the side of the bed and wipe the cobwebs of sleep from my
eyes. I can’t command any of my limbs to do anything. Do commanders shoot dead
all soldiers who disobey orders? That’s how I know I am still a danger to my
family.

My mother sweeps into the room that
very instance.

“Why
did you give me doormats for breakfast?” I yell at her in language I sure as
hell know she will understand. I have been speaking to them in ‘wonderspeak’.

“Leila,
no one did that to you…”

“Ametoka
kuzimu nini?” the voice that says that belongs
to none other than grandma’s.

“Mom,
please…” my mother turns to her mother.

Well,
for as long as I can remember I have one foot in hades. I try to struggle free
of the chains that keep me from attacking my family. The others mill into the
room slowly, one by one, until the one who shouldn’t creeps in like a ghost.

Zuleka
says the word that I hate and I release one deadening scream that cramps me
into a heap like a ventriloquist’s dummy, harmless without some spirit in me.

*

In my first
memory I am six years, six months and six days old; the dreaded number 666. I
am killing my sister, Zuleka. Sometimes the recollection is so clear I can feel
her body fighting the inevitable, her muscles slackening, she wanting
everything but death then wanting nothing no more. My mother walked in to check
on her, the princess of the family, and saved her. The next time I used a
pillow. She was asleep. She didn’t stand a chance. Mom and dad were going to
their bedroom that evening when they decided to pop in our room and see how
their lovely daughter was doing after the earlier incident.

They
saved Zuleka, again.

“This
never happened,” my father said. “This should never be known outside these
walls…”

From
then on I didn’t seem to exist, except in being kept away from her, until it
didn’t matter.

In
the end, I know, I have to kill my sister. That’s why I was born, or so I have
been told.

I
now know why I have to kill my sister. She is the slayer of the jinnees.
She doesn’t know this. It will be revealed to her on her seventeenth birthday.
She has two years before the epiphany.

The
jinnees are scared. They can’t leave the ocean. That’s where they have
lived all along, their home. Where would they go? I am the one to stop her.

On
Friday 13th June, 2014 I should kill Zuleka. If I fail then the next
time is when I am twenty-one. Friday 13th August, 2021. By then she
would have freed Mombasa of the jinnees.

*

I hear the creak
of every joint in my spine as I fall into the segue of conscious
unconsciousness. I am a ghost – I hear everything they say, see them hug Zuleka
and each other in solidarity yet I can’t do anything.

“Uliambiwa
huyu mtoto husimzae hukusikia,” grandma says.

“We
wouldn’t have known she would be like this, mom,” my mother responds.

“Now
what? She is a threat to all of us. She wants to kill her sister, who knows who
else is next…”

“I
love them both, mom. You are a mother…”

“Mtoto
wa kuzimu huyu. Lazima afe…”

Strange
things have been happening. All of a sudden temperatures in Mombasa have
dropped, it’s like we are in Mount Kenya. There have been whistles in the night
but you can’t see who is whistling. People have woken up to coconut trees
growing in their sitting rooms. Others have swallowed stones. Me I have feasted
on coconut shells, and now coir.

My sister tried
to kill me when she was six. As we grew older, it didn’t matter she counted
ways on which to accomplish her mission – poison, sprinkled on my food, or
laced in my drink; a shove down the cliff we liked to go to; electrocution.

I
am the psychic, but I failed to see this. Grandma calls her the ‘Devil’s
Child’, says she should be killed. My psychic powers haven’t worked.